Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Spring Break Roundup!

It's Spring Break! Sadly, that's markedly less exciting when you're 31 years old and revising article drafts.

Nonetheless, it does present a good opportunity to do a roundup.

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Kate Manne has an incredibly powerful essay on sexual violence, the struggles over reporting it, and why men get away with it. It follows on Martha Nussbaum's revelation, in a lecture last year, that she was sexually assaulted at 20 years old by a famous actor and her explanation for why she didn't report it. This is a must-read.

A neat looking art exhibit by Indian Jewish artist Siona Benjamin.

Truly every dark cloud has a silver lining: Donald Trump's army of internet trolls is in a state of panic over the upcoming rollback of internet privacy protections.

Hungary's right-wing government looks to try to close the Central European University. CEU was founded by George Soros, and if what the Hungarian right says about Soros sounds familiar, that's because it's identical to what the American right says about him. And if talking about shadowy international Jewish financiers threatening our way of life sounds a wee bit antisemitic when Hungarians do it, well, thank God for American exceptionalism.

Mayim Bialik and Emily Shire on Zionism and feminism (it's the latest salvo in this whole thing).

Maajid Nawaz, a former Muslim extremist turned liberal reformer, is profiled in the New York Times magazine. It is hardly uncritical, but it does seem to support the argument that the SPLC did a hatchet-job on him. And the observations about why it is difficult to promote "eat-your-peas" secular liberalism have resonance well beyond the Muslim community.

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